Twenty-six is not a particularly special number, and this would probably have a better impact if I had written it last year during the show’s 25th anniversary, but Timehop reminded me that on November 3, 1993, The Nanny premiered. It’s no longer the 3rd, because on the day I began writing this I also fell and sprained my arm in a major way (I was trying on rollerblades), so here we are, three days later.
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The Nanny has all the makings of something I would fall head-over-heels for, even (maybe especially?) at the age of 13: resemblance to the plot of The Sound of Music, a tall icy blonde, and references to musical theatre and Broadway. Of course, it was patterned after the 1965 movie musical, inspired by the time Fran Drescher spent with Twiggy’s daughter. “A spin on The Sound of Music,” Fran often recounts, “only instead of Julie Andrews, I come to the door.” I’m nothing, after all, if not predictable.
This show was my first fandom, and although it’s far from being moderately popular, as I’ve written about before, in my heart of hearts, it’s still just me, Photoshop CS3, and Tumblr’s 500kb gif limit taking on the world. I subsisted on Hallmark Channel re-runs and low-quality uploads of the episodes split into four parts on YouTube. (You were a real one, crywishes.) It would be a year before I would own the DVDs, and years before seasons four, five, and six would even be released. In 2010, a Nanny boxset just meant the first half of the show, and I wore those discs out.
For an impressionable 13-year old, The Nanny was as formative as formative can get—C.C. Babcock shaped the kind of fictional ladies that I would repeatedly fall for (blonde, icy, secretly wants to be loved); she and Niles were my very first OTP, and that pairing influenced the way I preferred my ship tropes in fiction (angst, pining, and years of unresolved sexual and romantic tension); and all the wacky references to Broadway strengthened my already-burning passion for musical theatre (a year prior, I was spiralling over The Sound of Music and I’d already spent more than half of my young life devoted to the 1997 Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella).
I used to make my own notebook covers and for my freshman year in high school, they were Nanny-themed.
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This show was a huge part of my headspace and internet activity for years. My first Tumblr username was pepperlane, after a grad school nickname that Lauren Lane had been baptized with. I learned how to make gifs because no one made Nanny gifs. My Firefox (I use Chrome now, don’t worry!) homepage was Twitter, my social media of choice, and The Really Unofficial Nanny Homepage, the oldest and most extensive Nanny fansite to date. It’s gone now, but Wayback Machine still has almost all of the pages, so it feels like it never left to begin with. It was a haven for Niles and C.C. fic, and all the work from its best authors still sit nicely in a folder on my external hard drive.
At the center of my Nanny experience was C.C. Babcock, and by extension, Lauren Lane. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it forever, but The Nanny is the reason I mastered the specifically gay art of being able to identify what season and episode it is based on my favorite actresses’ hair in the shows that I watch. I hyperfixated over C.C.’s perfectly coiffed tendrils—with these ‘dos in “Schlepped Away” and “Sunday in the Park with Fran” being my favorite—but I also hyperfixated on her stockinged thighs and the occasional cleavage just as much. In “Green Card,” when C.C. stood at the kitchen counter while a Frenchman peppered soft, light kisses on her arm, I knew I wanted to be in the Frenchman’s place.
There is no heterosexual explanation for this collage. Photo from my 9-year old Tumblr.
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Lauren Lane became a great big love of mine, and she was one of the first actresses whose entire filmography I dove into, or at least tried to. In my sophomore year of high school, just around the same time I’d begun to hyperfixate over other things and other women, I’d fallen deeply in love with my English teacher—a habit I just can’t seem to shake off—although I didn’t realize it at the time. All I knew then is that she had hands just like Lauren’s, but I couldn’t quite explain how, and I had often berated myself for paying too much attention to another woman’s body part.
I quietly obsessed (and agonized) over C.C.’s collarbone and neck, her lithe fingers and delicate wrists, the crinkles around her eyes, her deep voice, her laugh lines. I’d felt a mix of shame and absolute elation. I knew I was looking at a gorgeous woman, and that her face made feel so viscerally happy, but I also felt “weird” and “perverted”—actual terms I had used in my Tumblr tag commentary—despite not feeling that way whenever I professed my attraction to the doofus fictional Broadway producer of my heart, Maxwell Sheffield.
This photo was everything to my young teen self.
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It would be years until I would finally admit to myself that I was not straight (four years and another English teacher, to be exact), and for a long time, I couldn’t even say the word “gay” to describe what I was, despite falling steadily for a bevy of middle-aged actresses over the years: after Lauren came Helen McCrory, then Natasha Richardson, then Alex Kingston, Felicity Huffman, Wendie Malick, Irma Adlawan, Kelli O’Hara, Vera Farmiga, and Kristin Chenoweth. Did I just want to list down all my faves? You bet. But it wasn’t until I was on my seventh impassioned, emotional downward spiral that I took a step back and thought, “Wait a minute.”
The Nanny wasn’t what made me realize what my sexuality was—in retrospect, it was a bunch of text posts on Tumblr that I bookmarked deep into my browser, frightened for my life if anyone saw them and thought of me as anything but straight—but it was definitely what got me looking at women that way to begin with. When I realized (and finally admitted to myself) that I was gay, everything fell into place. That’s why I thirsted over C.C. like there was no tomorrow. That’s why her exposed skin made me want to tear my face off. That, most of all, is why I made this picspam of her face, set to Billy Joel’s “She’s Always A Woman.”
Hello, indeed.
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Today, The Nanny enjoys a renewed following from both millennials and Gen Z-ers, thanks to late-night reruns and What Fran Wore, an Instagram account that identifies and pays homage to all the clothes that Fran has worn on the show. It often makes me wish I had knowledge of fashion, because then there’d be What C.C. Wore, and it’ll just be me and maybe three people, all of whom would be gay. But yes: Happy 26th to my emotional support sitcom, and congratulations to me for finally finishing this piece, three days later.